One year ago today: April 11, 2015, take the blonde, you dork.
Five years ago today: April 11, 2011, Vernon Meyers, Canadian martyr.
Nine years ago today: April 11, 2007, one of two trucks . . .
Random years ago today: April 11, 2012, rent-a-jukebox.
MORNING
Here is what repairing an audio download looks like. If I get this working right, I’ll give some basic instructions tomorrow. What’s happening here is the way most sound card recording programs work is to take the analog card sound and digitalize it. But if you know Audacity, you can use a Windows feature called WASAPI to grab the original digital stream. The glitch is that if your input cannot keep your buffer full, digital doesn’t distort. It inserts a silent moment of silence into the track.
You can hear these easily, so the unsophisticated just keep recording it over and over until they get a good copy. Have not time for such and as shown here you can see how I’m highlighting and deleting a flat spot that is just 20/1000ths of a second long. Audacity is an amazingly competent application if you get to know it. This is an old Conway Twitty song. Which I can do if I change the key to G.
One last annoyance with Audacity (free to download, by the way) is that while it can change musical pitch, it cannot adjust the vocals to match. I regularly have to change keys for tunes by oddball voices like Freddy Fender or Roy Orbison. But the vocals come out like a chipmunk or a low growl.
But today, we are generally going to talk about money. Heck, nothing else is happening in the world. Nor around here. What is the reason gold and silver have such attraction as the backing for money? Why not seashells or stones? The biggest reason is that whatever you use to back your money, it must be a stable commodity. Thus, it helps if that commodity is rare, pretty, indestructible, and easy to store safely. Anything with these qualities would suffice.
The concept of money, that is, that the money is a type of receipt for something of value, rests on people’s belief that the money is worth something. Most currencies in the world are based on nothing but that belief. Put another way, people accept money because they think it can be exchanged for articles of value. Enter the money suppliers, the government. They can rob you of all your money by simply printing up more of it. It was put more eloquently by John Maynard Keynes in 1920, in his writing titled “Consquences of the Peace”:
“By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.... The process engages all of the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner that not one man in a million can diagnose."
In my lifetime, the government has taken away 90% of the value of the dollar. As a lad, with my paper route, I was keenly aware of the “degree of suffering” aspect of money. That is, the number of hours of work required to purchase things. If your wage was $1 per hour back then, you needed to work 20,000 hours to buy a decent house. Then, I discovered, thanks to taxes and interest, you actually had to work 40,000 hours. By eight years of age, I recognized this as theft by the system.
You could not get around it by building your own house, because there were regulations and zoning laws and code enforcements against that, too. How does that compare to today? Well, if you make $10 per hour and work 20,000 hours, you can’t buy most houses in Florida. Other than the offshore drug money, there is no bottom to the Florida pyramid. It is becoming a state of permanent renters. The people that retire here are bringing in a bulk of equity from their old house sale, not generating the money from profitable Florida endeavors.
Swamp in Germany.
NOON
So what holds value? What can you put money into that is safe. Answer: nothing. If the government will take private gold (1933), they will come after anything. Many fools of the past forty years thought it was wise to sink all into a house. Which most of them are still paying for. The fact is, my friends, value is a moving target. There is no such entity as a care-free investment. The best you can do is pick a combination of eggs and baskets and keep an eye on things. But never invest in anything you don’t understand.
If I had an arbitrary sum of money, how would I invest? My standard formula says you will need real estate, not because it is a winner, but because paying rent is a loser. Thus, buy the least expensive property that meets your personal standards. It does not make sense for me to buy some big mansion when a cottage will suffice. I would say, however that if you are going to live a house, you should have a second piece of property that brings in rent.
That rent does not have to pay your way. It merely has to be sufficient to take the pressure off your other income, particularly if that income is fixed like a pension. Rent can always be increased at the going rate, but landlordism is not for everybody. I happen to have experience at it. A cleaner approach to the same situation is to have other property that you are going to fix and flip. Keep in mind this requires more tied up money and is not something you can do at advanced age.
That’s the first 30% of your cash. The next 30% would right now be gold and silver, which has to explode sooner or later. It will represent the biggest shift of wealth in history. Next, I would place 20% in relatively secure investments, whatever you deem those to be. The next 10% into pure speculation, but never more than that. And [keep] 10% in cash, for targets of opportunity.
Investing like this carries a condition. None of the money listed above can be used in any way for living expenses. It has to remain invested and is not a pool you dip into when times are rough. It is expected that the investor has his personal affairs taken care of. It is always a mistake to use your core investment funds as a piggy bank.
The best known way to accomplish the above is to use a budget. Those who think that [budgeting] is too much hassle will suffer accordingly. Their yowling will not be heard. And would not be tolerated if it could be.
AFTERNOON
Four hours. That’s how long it took to do the chores today. Get a haircut, buy some groceries, buy some stamps and mail a letter. The old America is gone, there are lineups everywhere. Almost a full hour at the post office. This is what happens when you give civil servants job security. Jes’ puttin’ in time, puttin’ in time. You want to complain? There’s another lineup for that, too. And it’s not like people don’t see what good complaining has ever done at the post office.
Here’s some more filler. Abe, the barber, is going to pop a vein if he doesn’t get rid of that stress. Did I mention his father died and then his mother landed in the emergency ward over that. The point is, now that my own situation taught me what to look for, here’s a poor guy who doesn’t know he is headed straight for a coronary that’s going to put him out of business.
Myself, I relax by reading and I headed over to the library to unwind. I’ve said before how books tend to be more reliable than the Internet, if only because the author is more concerned about getting the facts right. He knows books tend to be around a long time. On the Internet? Pfft, easy come, easy go. If you see a list below, it’s the books I read or flipped through today for information.
So you could have sardines of cod, or sardines of herring, etc. This generation has probably never seen real or canned cod, mind you, after the Canadians totally raped the Grand Banks and left it to die. Sardines can apply to any small fish, and the smaller and younger, the higher the quality. And so you’ll know, smoked fish is smoked because it is just about to go bad. I know these things because raw fish is a regular in my diet.
This is also your trivia segment. I read up on Napster, the file-sharing company that A&M records put out of business. They not only shut them down, they fined Napster millions without having to prove that Napster had ever actually copied anything themselves. Napster only provided a service. But, in 2001, the mafia-owned big players in the music business were not about to let small details stand in their way. They even blocked the sale of Napster afterward to a German company. American recording companies make sure you stay dead.
NIGHT
That was Ruth on the phone, the creator of Wiggles. She has missed the two e-mails sent earlier, so this time it’s regular letter in the US mail. I have those stamps, so no lineups for the mailboxes. Or did I just give them another idea. Anyway, I’ve calculated if Ruth does write her memoirs, the proper size of the book is 200 to 240 pages and she has to choose her best material first. That, nobody else can do. I’ve advised her to pick 48 of the personalities that impressed her the most. She’s met them all. The Roosevelts, Nixon, The Beatles, Letterman. From that generation I mean.
I’ve seen that wall of photos and there material for several books of like size. Still, neither of us has any experience with such publication. I feel the best approach is to have as much of the material as ready as possible. It’s as sure a project as could be imagined for uniqueness, but you know, she lives way over in Arizona these days.
But that’s it with e-mail contacts. We can’t afford more delays and she is super getting up there. My plan is to arrange the 48 photos in some order, then to go through them and have her describe each, without her being aware she is being recorded. How’s that for artistic authoring? No, I didn’t learn that in journalism school. I don’t actually care who writes the book now, as long as I get the credit, you might say. Everybody wants to be an author at some point. But a real one, not only the blog kind.
I’ve researched what I can about similar books. None of them can match her array of autographed photos by the hundreds. Actors, musicians, presidents, media moguls. That has to be parlayed into a major selling point. I’m at a loss on how to proceed with and was truly surprised to learn that Ruth did not know I was a writer. Possibly the topic never came up, I know I don’t speak much in public or in most company about this blog, my biggest work. But how could she not know?
Anyway, I fired of a letter with clear instructions on how to pick the leading 48, then call me for what happens next. I was initially not enthusiastic about such a book. I’m slowly coming round.
ADDENDUM
Last day I mentioned “fractional metal reserve” which I see could stand some explaining. It works exactly the same as fractional banking, where the bank lends out ten times more money than they actually have on hand. This works on the principle that only 10% of all the bank’s investors are ever likely to show up at once and demand their money back. It works the same with precious metals.
The bank sells “certificates” but historically retained only 10% of the metal to meet any demand. However, in the past fifty years, the banks have gone overboard and the situation is now hair-trigger. You see, for each ounce of silver the banks physically possess, there are 228 people who think they own it because they have a certificate saying so. (Some say the true figure is closer to 300.)
See, all you have to do is read this blog regularly, and I get around to explaining complex things better than the big shots. If all remains stable, the banks could continue this scam without end. But, and there is always a but, the world has become mainly a single banking community, with every country’s bank issuing its own banknotes. That’s the fancy word for dollars.
If, anywhere on the planet, any one of these currencies collapses, people with cash will rush to buy silver and people with certificates will rush to cash them in for silver. Both groups are going to discover there is no silver. Demand, along with prices, will soar as all that worthless money tries to find sources of remaining silver. You want some? I have some. But it’s going to cost you a lot of that paper money.
There is only one certainty in all of this. One absolute that every one of the pundits, gurus, and authorities can agree on. It is that once the opportunity to cash in on this event is gone, there is no second chance. When will it happen? I dunno, I was hoping it would be back in 2013 and I’ve have my fancy house by now.
Last Laugh
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